Ironwolf Clan paid its respects tonight at Forbidra’s memorial. Tonight we weren’t Horde or Alliance, just friends. It reminded me of @mikemorhaime’s Blizzcon keynote “be kind and respectful for one another, and let’s remind the world what the game community is really all about.” pic.twitter.com/uRAWv4RbOZ

This show of support for Forbs—and for the gnomes—greatly touched me and my fellow guildmates.

Know that I am Preaching to the audience on this one. But if ever anyone says to you in game relationships aren’t real. I think that we can all agree that this was real. Sad but real. pic.twitter.com/BUv3CTMjFj

Never joined Gnomeregan Forever myself, but as someone who’s played on WRA since its inception, Forbs & G4 always brought a smile to my face. It’s a shame Forbs never saw Gelbin’s 8.1 Hero moment or what’s to come later but I’m sure they would’ve loved it. #ForbidraForever ⚙️ pic.twitter.com/3wJT30YBNc

Shadow Priest Gear Priorities for The Emerald Nightmare

I’ve linked to the Wowhead page for the LFR version of each item; from there you can select your mode of choice to review the different stats. If you’re not sure which piece of gear to use, as you juggle ilevels and stats, consider using an addon such as Pawn to help you more easily determine which piece of gear is your best choice.

Usually, silence on the blog means that I’m feeling disengaged with the game. But this time around it’s been quite the opposite.

As a very active participant in the Legion Alpha and Beta testing, I found myself completely caught up in the game for the first half of this year. In addition to trying out all the caster classes I usually play, I also leveled my Forsaken shadow priest to 110 and focused on leveling her tailoring, cooking, and fishing to max level.

Yes, that’s right…I leveled all those professions on a character who wasn’t going to be playable after the launch of the game…because I was having so much fun!

Fun!

The reason we play this game, right?

Which brings me to the other reason I’ve been quiet. I’ve been spending my live gaming time playing with a new guild. That’s right, I leveled several new gnomes after joining Gnomeregan Forever, an all-gnome guild on Wyrmrest Accord.

I’ve been trading tweets with the guild’s leader @gnomeregan4ever for several years now. And with the advent of gnome hunters with this expansion, it felt like to right time to go all-in on gnomification.

Although I’ve certainly internalized stories for my characters (and occasionally shared them here), this is my first time playing on an RP realm. And I have to say—I LOVE IT!

I’ve RP’d with a fellow fisherman on the Stormwind docks, who cheerfully shared his fishing tips (and Rumsey Rum) with me. I bantered with other bank alts on the difficulty of finding just the right outfit to project that serious but mischievous shopkeeper look.

And every day, as I am out and about in the world, I marvel at the seriously awesome outfits I see everyone wearing. In addition to the tier sets of years gone by, I’m so impressed by the very individualistic looks that the Wyrmrestians have put together. So you can definitely expect to see some fashion posts from me.

Suffice it to say this new server feels like home already. And we’re just getting started.

I promise you’ll be seeing a lot more from me on these pages soon. There’s just so much going on in-game right now that’s making me excited to log in every day. Here’s hoping it stays that way!

Why hello there. And yes, that IS a gnome hunter you see before you. A slightly confused survival hunter, mind you, but a gnome hunter all the same. And her trusty mechanical pet, Sparky.

Creating this gnome hunter was my first activity upon installing the Legion alpha. I thought it would be a good way to warm up before jumping into the expansion, given how many hunter alts I’ve levelled as of late. But it was actually a pretty strange experience due to survival being the only spec available to you. And survival being all about being a melee hunter.

Now, melee hunter is not an altogether new concept for me. I do recall being in Scholomance in vanilla WoW and having a melee hunter, who kept dying, as part of the dungeon group we’d assembled. But I honestly hadn’t given it another thought until we’d heard about the spec overhaul at Blizzcon this year. Luckily, my experience with the all new melee hunter spec did not involve lots of dying. The hatchet throw works well for pulling a mob away from an area that a patrol might walk too close to, and the harpoon shot is an efficient way to get you to melee range of your target. Right now, however, the leveling experience is a bit off. At level three you get a quest reward gun that you can’t use at all. In fact, you are using auto shot and your pet to slowly kill your mobs, thanks to your bare action bars. After a few levels of this minimalism, I was ready to check out the shadow priesting.

I can’t speak for any other shadow priests, but as I watched the Warcraft Legion systems panel, I started to get nervous when I saw shadow priests as the third bullet on the Immersion slide. I’m already quite immersed with playing my shadow priests, thank you very much! And I haven’t forgotten just how recently Blizzard wanted to “improve” our gameplay by taking away our Devouring Plague, a spell that many Forsaken shadow priests such as myself consider to be a cornerstone of our repertoire and story.

That said, I kept an open mind as we heard their initial comments on the class changes for Legion:

Shadow priests in Legion will no longer be the “poor cousin of the affliction warlock”.

We gain our powers by tapping into the power of the void.

The void is controlled by the old gods, and we all know that spending too much time with the Old Gods drives one to insanity

Thus, the new resource for shadow priests= insanity. No more mana or shadow orbs.

As your insanity increases, your shadow form gets darker. You grow tentacles out of your body. And you ultimately end up in void form.

“Ultimate but fleeting power” because no one can harness insanity forever.

All of the above sounds interesting in theory, right up until I sprout tentacles and end up in a void form. That’s where I start to worry. Worry that this will feel like I’m watching the terrible Blade 1 CGI animations come to life. Only happening to my beloved shadow priest. And then there’s the maturity level of my fellow players. I still remember the incredibly crass and insensitive Big Wigs raid warnings that went out in AQ that some teenage boy somewhere thought was amusing. Am I going to get that every time I tentacle out in an LFR? Blech.

Today, Blizzard released more information on the priest class changes, including a narrative around our new insanity affinity. Here’s their intro to our class story:

The Light in which many priests bathe is brilliant and effervescent, granting them immense divine power. But the brightest light casts the darkest shadow—and from within this blackness, a rival power dwells. Shadow priests fully embrace this opposing polarity, their faith equally resolute as their holy counterparts—but focused on shadowy magics and mental manipulation. Like all priests, they dedicate much of their lives to worship—but they derive their power from the Void, straying dangerously close to the domain of the Old Gods. To truly understand such ancient, corruptive influence is to be driven mad. This is the state in which these dark priests thrive, embracing insanity and feeding off of the minds of their opponents to reach terrifying new limits.

The blog post goes on to discuss how our key talents will generate insanity, with one notable spell missing from the line-up: Devouring Plague. Was this an oversight? Or is this another run at removing it from our spellbook? Only time will tell. Another interesting decision is removing our healing spells, which makes sense, and giving us a dark mending (which sounds a lot like how we used to be able to use our Cascade to heal), and keeping our Power Word: Shield. But despite the emphasis on making each spec unique, they’re also giving Discipline Prests the Dark Mending too. I should also note we’ll now have a significant, powerful cooldown: oblivion. Every 2 minutes we can trigger it to gain 100 insanity.

I’m hoping to get my hands on a BETA invite so I can do some significant poking around with the shadow priest changes and provide feedback. I think the vision Blizzard has presented sounds like it has some great potential. But I’m also concerned it may not really work for me. And as someone who has had a shadow priest main since the end of Burning Crusade, that’s a real concern. For now, I’m cautiously optimistic. Stay tuned.

It’s honestly a little strange to think that we’re already nearly two months in to Warlords of Draenor. Usually, I spend the first few months of the expansion with the blog in hyper drive, creating to do lists, compiling gear lists, etc. But not this time.

Instead, in part due to limited play time, combined with the significant time sink created by Garrison management on multiple characters characters (at 6 now), I’ve been MIA on the blog. But the start of a new year seemed like a good time to dust things off and say hello.

My first level 100 was, no surprise, my Forsaken shadow priest. I’ve gone the CoP talent build route, but kept insanity. The path to max level was pretty quick, as was the gearing up, despite the 3-piece crafted gear limit. That meant I got to do MC at the end of the first week of the expansion, and go with our first guild group into Highmaul. Unfortunately, that’s been my only raid.

I’m crossing fingers we see a regular raiding schedule go up soon, and that I’ll somehow manage to get home in time to participate regularly. If I’m not raiding regularly, I find my interest level in the game (along with my amount of blogging) drops off substantially. We shall see.

The guild I’d moved most of my Alliance toons to has been pretty quiet (and I somehow never got my account approved on their website after all this time!) So I’ve been pretty focused on my horde alts, though I did start leveling a boosted Alliance shadow priest to play with my Friend or Foe peeps. It has been interesting to see what the Alliance story arc entails. So far, the Horde story (and quest mechanics) are winning out over the Alliance, but I’m just about to head to Gorgrand, so perhaps my opinion will change?

At the top of the page, those black wings you see are my beloved Forsaken shadow priest getting her black wings of doom from the Black Prince, in exchange for finally finishing off the legendary cloak questline. I’d stalled out and not done the PvP portion of the chain after it taking forever to get my tokens in LFRs. So there’s one item checked off my list.

I’ve been doing a serious amount of pet collecting as well, with the 4 Celestials pets at the top of my want list. I’ve gotten my first one, Xu-Fu, seen here in shadowform with me, and am on my way to the other 3, and should have them in hand before WoD drops.

I’m also working on getting my first-ever paladin to 90 (she’s at 77), and got my first level 90 hunter Alliance side a couple of months back. Which means of course I had to go and start a horde hunter this weekend…

But that’s the easy part– the what I’ll be able to accomplish. It’s what won’t be done that always weighs heaviest. For me, it’s the Challenge Mode dungeons. I had high hopes of getting a regular group together to run these, but it never seemed to happen. So I’m actually going to end the expansion without having done even one. Which is a bummer.